Допомога з адаптацією 🇺🇸🇨🇦 2025 🇺🇦 Lily Boiko

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A fragment from my book “Eternally Fantastic”, inspired by the Maldives:

“The Art of Simply Being

On a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, life flows differently. There is no rush. No pressure. No obsession with climbing invisible ladders. People live in harmony with nature, not in a battle against time.

There are no luxury brands, no designer handbags, no diamond-studded status symbols screaming for attention. No one is competing. No one is trying to prove their worth through possessions. Here, existence itself is enough.

I watched as locals moved through their days with effortless ease—fishing, sharing meals, laughing under the open sky. Their joy wasn’t tied to material things; it came from the simplest experiences: the warmth of the sun, the rhythm of the waves, the embrace of the ocean breeze.

And then I thought about the Western world.

Where more is never enough.
Where people sacrifice their peace for bigger houses, fancier cars, higher salaries—believing that happiness is always just around the next corner.
Where we are conditioned to do, achieve, accumulate—yet we have forgotten how to simply be.

And for the first time, I questioned everything.

The Fear That Runs the Western World

I began to notice something striking—the wealthier the country, the more fearful its people seemed to be.

Western societies, built on financial success and material wealth, also thrive on fear. Fear of losing what we have. Fear of not being enough. Fear of not keeping up.

And fear is profitable.

America is a perfect example. There are insurance policies for everything—life, health, home, cars, even travel. Entire industries are built around preventing loss, around creating a false sense of control over the unknown.

And yet, no matter how many safety nets are put in place, fear never disappears—it only grows.

Contrast that with the Maldives.

After landing at the airport, I took a speedboat to a small island. There were no life jackets, no seat belts, just the raw, open ocean and the sound of the waves crashing against the boat. Children were on board, completely unfazed. No one panicked. No one questioned safety regulations.

And yet, I felt safer than I ever had in the hyper-regulated Western world.

There were no rigid traffic laws here either. I saw construction workers standing in the back of an open truck, cruising down the road at high speed—something unimaginable in the U.S.

And yet, no one lived in constant fear of what might go wrong.

People here weren’t obsessed with controlling life. They were living it.

The Illusion of Security

Western society teaches us that safety equals control. That if we just follow enough rules, secure enough wealth, protect ourselves from every possible danger, we can eliminate risk.

But what if this obsession with security is actually what keeps us trapped?

Because the more we cling to material things, the more we fear losing them.
The more we structure our lives around stability, the more fragile we become.
The more we try to control life, the more it controls us.

In the Maldives, people had less than the average Westerner, yet they were infinitely freer.

They weren’t running in circles, trying to accumulate more. They weren’t drowning in endless responsibilities, afraid to pause, afraid to fall behind. They simply lived.

And in that simplicity, there was something I had never seen so clearly before:

A peace that money can never buy.

Escaping the Cage We Built for Ourselves

We like to believe we are free.
But are we really?

Most people in the Western world live inside an invisible cage—one built from constant pressure, endless expectations, and the fear of not being enough.

We sacrifice our health, our relationships, our sanity for success.
We justify exhaustion as productivity, stress as ambition, busyness as purpose.
We convince ourselves that the more we own, the happier we will be—but the more we own, the more we are owned by it.

And for what?”

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Допомога з адаптацією 🇺🇸🇨🇦 2025 🇺🇦 Lily Boiko